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AMD APU vs. Radeon GPU Open-Source Comparison

12-08-2013, 07:20 AM

Phoronix: AMD APU vs. Radeon GPU Open-Source Comparison

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks showing that with the very latest open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code, the AMD APU Gallium3D performance can be ~80%+ the speed of Catalyst, the notorious Linux binary graphics driver. For end-users curious what the AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU performance is comparable to when it comes to discrete Radeon graphics cards with the R600 Gallium3D driver, here's some weekend comparison benchmarks.

Comment

I was going to ask the same question. There is a huge difference between 1333 and even 1866.

The performance scales with DDR3 speed, seeing that all AMD mobos claim to be able to hit at least DDR2 2133 and that DDR3 2133 stock speed low voltage and timing ram is within $5 of 1866 for the same capacity it only makes sense to use that as a baseline.

Ram OC tests with the AMD APUs show that the GPU is heavily limited by the ram and will continue to scale pretty much linearly with that speed if you don't let the timings get out of hand and kill the performance gains.

For the APUs upping your latency timings to 13-13-13-31 just to hit a higher MHZ is going to be no better then 11-11-11-27 at a lower Mhz. I forget the formula right now to calculate it.

If you intend to game with them go for at least DDR3 2.4Ghz and disable the power saving modes.

Comment

Disabling power saving modes will not increase your performance, it will only waste power.

The tests don't show that, disabling the power saving features raises your minimum framerate. While this does nothing for your max framerate, the max framerate doesn't matter, minimum and frame latency do. So what if you can hit 500FPS nose up to a blank wall when your framerate consistently falls below 30FPS during heavy action?

I take it you don't understand this concept because minimum framerate is yet another thing Larabel doesn't do that all of the decent Windows hardware reviewers have been doing forever.

Comment

The tests don't show that, disabling the power saving features raises your minimum framerate. While this does nothing for your max framerate, the max framerate doesn't matter, minimum and frame latency do. So what if you can hit 500FPS nose up to a blank wall when your framerate consistently falls below 30FPS during heavy action?

I take it you don't understand this concept because minimum framerate is yet another thing Larabel doesn't do that all of the decent Windows hardware reviewers have been doing forever.

Does that even apply now that the CPU governor was fixed in kernel 3.12?